[ronncat]

Bill,

Congrats on the new job, and the new mill! Thanks for encouraging words. As far as kits go, now that you have a mill, you are in a great position to make kits to CNC this lathe. And with all your experience....

Again, let me reiterate. I started this thread to share with everyone what my thoughts were in designing and fabricating a conversion for my 8X12 lathe. I was hoping that any feedback from other members of the forum would steer this newbie machinist in the right direction. This is only a hobby for me, and I am enjoying every minute of it. If someone wanted to make it more than a hobby (for themselves) they are more than welcome to use and improve upon my ideas to create a kit for the 8X12 lathe. I will even help (in my free time) by suppyling drawings, dxf files, or whatever I have that I can dig up. Since I did this a piece at a time, these files are scattered all around on my computer.

In the meantime... I decided that for a CNC lathe, the compound slide would be mostly redundant, so I did away with it and replaced it with a 1" steel riser block. Hopefully this will act to stiffen the machine even further.





Now.... my attention is focused on building the controller box for the build. The computer is up and running Mach3 lathe. I activated the Dolphin CADCAM turning module and have played a bit with that...very cool. I am trying to get everything up and running by the end of the month so that I can start getting this machine DIRTY:banana::banana: